By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Tag Archives: new media

Congratulations to WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) and John Davidow, the executive editor of WBUR.org, who won a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to experiment with how digital tools should be used to cover trials and other court proceedings.

Davidow tells Laura McGann of the Nieman Journalism Lab that Quincy District Court will be used as a model to come up with a consistent set of guidelines that will foster greater openness.

Issues to be dealt with include whether and under what circumstances citizen journalists can live-blog a trial, and if one of the parties may post to Twitter in real time — as former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who faces federal corruption charges, wanted to do. Davidow tells McGann:

The courts have sort of gone further and further way from the public and public access. In the old days, they were built in the center of town. The community was able to walk into the courts and see what was going on. Modern life has done away with that. The bridge that was going in between the courts and the public was the media. The media has just less resources.

Davidow’s was one of 12 projects that will receive $2.74 million in the coming year. The others range from ideas to crowdsource the funding of public radio stories to various efforts aimed at melding mapping and gaming features with news presentations. Here is the complete list.

The Boston Globe, too. The Knight folks have announced that the Globe will receive a contract for more than $130,000 to develop and test a widget based on EveryBlock, an automated, hyperlocal aggregation platform, as part of a $450,000 program called OpenBlock.

Like this:

In my latest for the Guardian, I follow up my recent interview with SeeClickFix co-founder and chief executive Ben Berkowitz by taking a look at how news organizations such as the New Haven Independent and the Boston Globe have put its tools to work.

SeeClickFix is an interactive website that lets users report problems in their communities and plot them on a Google map. Because it’s an open forum, local officials can check in to see where trouble spots are, and news organizations can track them as well. The New Haven Independent is one of many news sites that posts the RSS feed for its community. The interactive pothole map at Boston.com is powered by SeeClickFix as well.

On May 18 I had a chance to sit down with SeeClickFix co-founder and chief executive Ben Berkowitz in his second-floor office in downtown New Haven. Berkowitz, a hyperkinetic 31-year-old, had forgotten we were supposed to meet, but he graciously agreed to a video interview despite having a full agenda.

Berkowitz describes SeeClickFix as “citizens working collectively,” and explains that he started it three years ago when he was trying to get graffiti cleaned up in his neighborhood. The site has been growing rapidly since the New York Times published a feature story on it in January.

Today, the company has some 400 media partners and employs five people thanks to a $25,000 We Media prize and several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of venture capital. Although the basic service is free, SeeClickFix charges media sites for certain premium services, and posts advertising as well.

One aspect of Berkowitz’s philosophy that I found particularly interesting was his insistence that SeeClickFix is not just for holding government accountable — citizens, too, should take responsibility. As an example, he pointed to a similar project, the British website FixMyStreet — a great name that he nevertheless doesn’t like, he says, because it removes accountability from citizens and places it entirely on the government.

Does Berkowitz, who previously worked as a Web designer, consider himself a journalist? He pauses before answering. “I think SeeClickFix is a tool for journalists,” he replies. “I don’t think that I am a journalist. I don’t think of us as a news organization.”

For a good example of how journalists can use SeeClickFix as a reporting tool, see this story on “the ugliest storefront on Chapel Street” in the New Haven Independent.

The Valley Independent Sentinel, an affiliate of the New Haven Independent, live-streamed a Fat Tuesday pazcki-eating contest this morning from a bake shop in Ansonia, Conn. You can view the clips here.

How did they do it? They used a Motorola Droid cellphone connected to Qik. Consider this yet another sign that a journalist can no longer walk out the door carrying just a notebook and a pen.

Like this:

On Wednesday I mentioned Global Voices Online, a Harvard-affiliated service that was rounding up citizen media from Haiti and the Caribbean.

Global Voices has since set up a Haitian Earthquake 2010 section that aggregates citizen-produced content and includes key links to mainstream news organizations — including the Boston Haitian Reporter. It’s got its own RSS feed, so you can plug it into Google Reader.

Towards 4:45 PM, with our driver, we enter the parking lot of Karibean, Pétion-ville’s big mart. As usual, the way in is slowed by the usual Delmas traffic. While driving up the entry, our Patrol began to dance. I was imagining three or four boys standing on the bumper wanting to swing the car. In front of us, the parking lot ground rocked like the waves at Wahoo Bay. The Karibean building started to dance and in 3 seconds’ time completely tumbled down. A white cloud swept across the parking lot and you could see zombies whitened by dust appearing, in complete panic.

The earthquake is a tragedy whose full dimensions won’t be known for quite some time